The scary history of the Doomsday Clock

On a beautiful spring day in 1947, a bunch of atomic scientists got together and asked themselves a question: "How can we make everyone in the world simultaneously wet themselves with fear?" It was a profoundly important question with worldwide implications for both humans and for the companies that manufacture adult diapers.

According to Wired, The Doomsday Clock was the brainchild of a group of scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, you know, the whole reason why we have to worry about nuclear annihilation in the first place. Evidently they were feeling kind of bad about the whole probable destruction of the Earth thing and wanted some way to impress upon people just how far up a certain unpleasantly brownish-colored creek without an instrument of propulsion the human race actually was. So they commissioned artist Martyl Landsdorf to create the cover art for the June 1947 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Initially she wanted to design the cover around the symbol for uranium, but that wasn't really enough to trigger incontinence in the average person, so instead she hit on the idea of a clock. Now, like Cinderella at the ball, prisoners awaiting execution, and people waiting in line on Black Friday (hey you do know you can shop online, now, right?) we can all stare at the Doomsday Clock and anticipate our own deaths instead of leading boring, unburdened lives. Thanks, scientists!

The Bulletin likes to keep us guessing by moving the clock's hand back and forth and back and forth in an endless parody of "Hey we're about to die!" to "Hey we're almost about to die!" to "Hey we're about to die but just not as soon as we originally thought!" And it's been ever so much fun, like riding on a roller coaster with a bunch of missing track that someone just vomited all over.

The number of minutes we have left to live has been changed 24 times since 1947, and if you think of the world sort of like a dying cancer patient and you try to put yourself in that dying cancer patient's hospital booties, then that's sort of like if a doctor came into your room and told you how much time you have left but then came back a couple days later with a different number and then came back again a week after that with a different number, until finally you just ripped off your respirator and begged a nurse to put a couple of air bubbles in your IV. Seriously, didn't anyone ever think to tell the Bulletin that their idea totally sucked? 

In 1991, the Science and Security board figured it was 17 minutes to midnight. That's the farthest we've ever been from the apocalypse, which really doesn't seem very far at all. If you think of doomsday as midnight on New Year's Eve, then 17 minutes before midnight is when you're getting your champagne out of the fridge and making sure everyone you love is all together and you're settling down in front of the clock so you don't miss anything. Sort of like doomsday, actually, because what else are you going to do besides get drunk with the people you love and watch the bombs go off? Anyway at 17 minutes to midnight you're pretty much aware that the jig is up, and you're just waiting for it to be over, so the Science and Security board wasn't really making anyone feel warm and cozy by moving the hand all the way back to 17.

What made scientists so partially optimistic (but not really) back in 1991? According to the World Atlas, that was the end of the Cold War and the beginning of non-hostile cooperation between America and the Soviet Union, and for a few minutes it even looked like maybe we'd both be reducing our nuclear arsenal to the point where we could only blow up the whole world a couple of times instead of a couple of dozen times. So yeah, we were much, much safer. That was sarcasm, in case you're a little behind.

Now, in retrospect, we were probably like 15 seconds to midnight during the Cuban Missile crisis, but happily the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists didn't explicitly get to tell us that by gleefully unveiling the next version of their clock with its hands almost vertical. In 1962 the clock was set to seven minutes to midnight, so we should have been having "Yay we're only sort of close to the destruction of the Earth" parties because most of the time the hands of the clock are way more doomsdayish than that.

In January 2017 Lawrence Krauss, who is the chairman of the board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, told NPR that the board doesn't put a lot of weight onto individual events (except, evidently for the exploding of small islands in the Pacific), preferring instead to base their decision on global trends and the political climate. And there was also the problem where no one really knew what was happening during the Cuban Missile Crisis until it was over, so the Bulletin kindly decided not to freak everyone out by changing the clock based on an event that was already in the past.

The really annoying thing about the Doomsday Clock is its design — most of the time, it's depicted just as the upper left quarter of a clock, which implies that we're always going to be pretty much within the last 15 minutes of life on Earth. That seems pretty unapologetically fatalistic, but maybe the board is worried that we'll develop actual hope if they show us the whole clock, and nobody wants that.

Besides being a not-very-objective look into the future, the clock's design has some fundamental problems, most notably the absence of a point of reference that we can use to actually gauge how dire two minutes, five minutes, or ten minutes actually is. Where, for example, would the clock have been during palaeolithic times? 11 p.m.? 7 a.m.? And what does that say about the fate of the neanderthals because it was basically doomsday for them at that point, wasn't it? Would they get their own clock?

According to Wired, Eugene Rabinowitch explained it like this: "[The clock] is intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age." Okay, but just give us a baseline. You guys are scientists. It shouldn't be that hard.

Well, no, or we would have all exploded at midnight the day after the June 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences hit the newsstands. But we're still here, so "accurate" is probably not the right adjective.

According to Wired, the Doomsday clock is symbolic. It's not meant to be predictive — rather, it's a warning that is supposed to motivate us into action, right after we're all done changing our pants. The clock's original purpose was just to get everyone's attention, and it's certainly succeeded in doing that. And every time they move the hand forward or backward, that gets our attention, too, so no matter how hard we try we never really get to forget about the Doomsday Clock.

Is it the right kind of attention, though? Scientists hoped the Doomsday Clock would inspire everyone to get up and collectively work toward real, positive change … on the other hand, it's unclear exactly how we're going to do that when we're all cowering under our beds.

Now that you've got a shovel in one hand and a truckload of Dennison's chili sitting in your driveway, here's some reassurance — we can turn the clock back again, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was kind enough to tell us how. For a start, we can elect leaders who refrain from "provocative rhetoric regarding North Korea." And we can do other stuff about North Korea, too, like talk to them (how's that for groundbreaking) but not in a nasty, annoying sort of way. Governments all over the world can recommit to policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, and Russia and the U.S. can be nice to each other and work together.

So yeah, that's not really anything the average person can do much about, apart from calling up a congressman or two and voting for people who say they'll do that, which makes the whole scaring-the-pants-off-us thing that much more pointlessly cruel. So do your part as a concerned citizen, sure, but make sure you also have some champagne stashed away in that bunker so you can lift a glass when the end of the world finally arrives. You're gonna need it.